2025-01-30 22:06:02
On the day of President Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Kash Patel, who has been nominated to serve as the next F.B.I. director, appeared before a sea of MAGA hats in Washington, D.C.,’s Capital One Arena and paid his respects to law enforcement. “Our police officers, our sheriffs, our federal agents are some of the greatest warriors that God has ever created,” Patel said. “We will put them first because they have our backs and now we will have your backs.”
Hours later, from the Oval Office, Trump signed a stunning executive order that granted pardons to more than fifteen hundred individuals who had been convicted of crimes linked to the violent Capitol riot four years ago. At least six hundred of those who received pardons were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Among them were individuals such as David Nicholas Dempsey, who, according to prosecutors, attacked officers with “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on,” and who, until Trump’s pardon, was serving a prison sentence of twenty years.
The executive order was not entirely a surprise. Trump had repeatedly promised to pardon the January 6th rioters, whom he had been referring to as “hostages” for several years. But he had always been vague about what a potential pardon process would look like, or whether it would apply to the most violent offenders. What came as a shock, even to some of his Republican allies, was the sheer scale of the order.
Last week, Senator Dick Durbin, who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met with Patel and asked him to explain how he squared Trump’s pardons with his plans to run America’s top law-enforcement agency. According to Durbin, Patel said that he’d have to run the question “up the chain of command” before he could say anything that would be in the public record. Later, speaking from the Senate floor, Durbin expressed “grave concerns” about Patel’s fitness to lead the F.B.I., calling him a “staunch political loyalist who has repeatedly peddled false conspiracy theories and threatened to retaliate against those who have slighted him personally and politically.”
In a different era, this would have been the sort of excoriating appraisal that a Cabinet nominee would spend a great deal of time trying to rebut. And, presumably, in his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Patel, the nominee whose responsibilities are the most closely aligned with Trump’s agenda, will deflect, downplay, and deny. But, for Patel, the qualities that Durbin lists—flamboyant obeisance, a fluency in fringe narratives, and a commitment to a form of politics that openly flaunts aggression—aren’t liabilities. They are his principal assets.
In Patel’s late thirties, after working as a public defender in Miami and then as a Department of Justice trial attorney, he landed a job as a Hill staffer in the office of Devin Nunes, who was then the top Republican representative on the House Intelligence Committee. Patel, in his new role, became instrumental in helping to craft the G.O.P. response that aimed to discredit the investigations into suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. For Patel and his colleagues, the conspiracy theories coming out of the extremist right presented a tremendous opportunity. If Patel wed himself to a narrative fantasy that spun the investigation into Trump’s team as litigation of Trumpism itself, then he could get Trump’s ear—and craft a successful and lucrative public persona.
Indeed, he rose through the ranks quickly, landing a number of national-security roles. In the final months of the Trump Administration, he became chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher C. Miller. According to the Washington Post, he went to battle with the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and, with Trump’s support, nearly wound up as the acting director of the C.I.A.
After Trump’s first, failed bid for a second term, and the events of January 6, 2021, when thousands of angry supporters, galvanized by election conspiracies, some of them armed with improvised weapons, overpowered law enforcement and stormed the Capitol, it seemed, to some, like the logical end point of the sort of soldierly fealty that Patel had come to represent—a case study in how right-wing personalities who harness the cultural power of conspiracy theories to secure personal power might, in the end, be consumed by the blaze turned bonfire of their own making. The riot had showed the violent underbelly of the MAGA movement, and was branded an insurrection. The former President left D.C. a pariah; he and his allies scrambled to distance themselves from the ugliness of what had happened. Trump called the riot a “heinous attack” and said that he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.” Meanwhile, as the January 6th arrests piled up, Patel faced an investigation by the Justice Department into whether he had mishandled classified information. (Patel described reporting about the investigation, which never resulted in criminal charges, as a “bald-faced lie.”)
Then, halfway through 2021, around the same time that the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was formed, a narrative that sympathized with the January 6th rioters started making its way from the far-right fringes into right-wing media. At that point, many of the most serious pretrial offenders from the riot were sequestered in their own unit in the D.C. jail, which became known by some of its residents as the Patriot Wing.
I spent more than a year reporting on the Patriot Wing, and I watched it become an incubator for many of the same grievances that had brought the inmates to the Capitol in the first place. I saw how, with the help of activists, the men there were able to establish a media operation that enabled them to get their messaging out to sympathizers. What began as the inmates’ claims of poor treatment at the hands of jail officials soon morphed into a full-blown fantasy of political persecution that spread to the pro-Trump media, picking up momentum as Trump’s own legal problems mounted. The term “political prisoner” began to proliferate. Infowars ran headlines such as “AMERICAN GULAG: Political prisoners tortured in enemy-occupied DC jail.” A pro-Trump cartoonist published an image showing gaunt men wearing Trump merch, languishing in a jail cell together. These accounts helped animate a new movement of so-called January 6th activists, who wrote letters to the prisoners and raised money for their legal defenses. Trump’s most stalwart supporters in Congress at the time—Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert—took up the narrative and got to work giving it legitimacy.
This new movement dovetailed precisely with Patel’s past work—and, to some extent, his own brush with the Justice Department—and he picked it up with relish. In September, he co-launched a new Web site, Fight with Kash; his own line of branded K$H apparel; and the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust, which he described as a “fund designed to give those smeared by the fake news media and big tech a voice.” An archived “About” page touts Patel’s “distinguished career as a prosecutor, lawyer, and national security professional,” who took down “senior leaders” in ISIS and Al Qaeda and exposed “the deep state’s Russia collusion hoax against President Trump.” He promised that donations to the fund would “help send earth-shattering jolts through the Fake News media and Deep State.”
In the next few years, Patel flirted with another conspiracy theory linked to January 6th, which was in full swing by early 2022. “Jan. 6 [was] never an insurrection,” Patel wrote in a Truth Social post last year. “Cowards in uniform exposed, they broke the chain of command, and violated the law.” The “Fedsurrection” conspiracy stemmed from speculation that a man named Ray Epps—who was captured in video footage on January 6th seemingly encouraging rioters to enter the Capitol—was an undercover federal agent who embedded himself in the crowd with the goal of inciting violence. These stories about Epps were repeatedly debunked, including by Epps himself and by the January 6th select committee. But the idea that hordes of undercover agents instigated the Capitol riot gained traction and fuelled right-wing hostilities toward the Bureau. In August of 2022, after federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago as part of their investigation into potential mishandling of classified Presidential documents, a Trump supporter armed with a nail gun attempted to storm an F.B.I. office in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In his book, “Government Gangsters,” published in 2023, Patel paints the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as hotbeds of corruption. He writes that the Bureau has “gravely abused its power” and become fixated on conducting “ideological witch hunts” against “political opponents of the ruling class.” One of the book’s appendices features a list of sixty people whom Patel suspects to be members of the “Executive Branch Deep State.” Among them are almost a dozen current and former F.B.I. employees, including the outgoing director, Christopher Wray, who was originally appointed by Trump. Through the Kash Foundation, he has backed the now suspended F.B.I. special agents Stephen Friend and Garrett O’Boyle, who, according to a three-hundred-and-fifteen-page report by House Democrats, were part of a rogue group of F.B.I. agents who called themselves “The Suspendables” and touted themselves as “Whistleblowers” while trafficking in “alarming” conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and January 6th. (In an interview with Roger Stone last year, Patel called Friend a “brave warrior” and a “great F.B.I. agent,” and suggested that he ought to be installed at a senior leadership level within the F.B.I.)
By the time Trump launched his 2024 campaign, Patel’s involvement with the J6ers had become hands-on. He produced a track, “Justice for All,” which featured the J6 Prison Choir—including defendants who had assaulted police during the Capitol riot— singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and audio of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It was one of the songs that opened the first rally of Trump’s campaign, in Waco, Texas. Footage from the riot played on a screen behind him.
At this point, Patel had successfully built a personal brand for himself within the sprawling MAGA media ecosystem. He was given a seat on the board of Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs Truth Social. (Since the Web site’s inception, he has published more than ten thousand posts). He also partnered with Revere Payments, which describes itself as a “the top cancel culture proof” payment processing company, and Patriot Mobile, “America’s ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider.” He has advertised for a diet-supplement line called Warrior Essentials, and promised followers that its products will help “reverse the vaxx.” He also sold a children’s-book series, about a beleaguered monarch named Donald the Merchant who encounters nefarious schemes designed to usurp his power, including a dragon whose initials are D.O.J. His bids for attention extended to the QAnon movement: he’s defended its adherents, appeared several times on a high-profile QAnon podcast, and, as a board member for Truth Social, reportedly suggested incorporating QAnon imagery on the platform.
By November, 2024, the most militant arm of the MAGA movement may have appeared, to an outsider, to be defanged compared with what it was four years ago. The Proud Boys didn’t mobilize; fears about election intimidation never materialized. The Justice Department had secured more than a thousand convictions in connection to January 6th, and the myth of “Fedsurrection” had generated so much paranoia on the right that Trump supporters were generally steering clear of Washington, D.C., altogether.
But Trump’s victory marked a great triumph for the persecution narratives that his acolytes, Patel included, worked hard to construct since January 6th, which had been instrumental in resuscitating the flailing MAGA movement—and in boosting their own cultural profiles. The January 6th rioters’ grievances, which are tethered to an alternate reality of deep-state operatives and political persecution, are the same that have shaped Patel’s through-the-looking-glass version of events of the past ten years. That’s the perspective he wants to bring to the F.B.I.
If confirmed, Patel, who has never worked for the F.B.I. nor has any significant experience running a major government department (or even a company) would oversee the operations of one of America’s largest federal law-enforcement agencies. He would have a free hand in hiring and firing personnel, and the ability to restructure the Bureau as he sees necessary. Patel suggested that, as F.B.I. director, he’d move Bureau operations out of D.C., shutter the F.B.I.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, and reopen it as a “museum of the deep state.” In “Government Gangsters,” he calls for the next President to clear house at the F.B.I. and fire everyone in the Bureau’s top ranks—anyone who, in Patel’s view, “abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
So far, Patel has offered no assurances that he’d continue in the tradition of the F.B.I. chief operating independently from the President. Just as Patel has voiced, in veiled terms, few qualms about jailing his own political enemies, he’s made it clear that he sees himself and Trump as being united on their righteous campaign to destroy the very government they are meant to lead. “The Colosseum is built and Donald J. Trump is our champion,” Patel said, at a Trump rally in September. “He is our juggernaut of justice.” ♦
2025-01-30 20:06:02
In 1970, six years into Brazil’s military dictatorship, Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing politician, returned to the country after years of self-imposed exile. Not long after setting up home in Rio de Janeiro with his wife and their five children, he was arrested, on January 20, 1971. His wife, Eunice, was also detained and interrogated, and she never saw her husband again: only much later was it confirmed that Rubens had been tortured and murdered not long after his arrest. In the years that followed, Eunice earned a law degree and became a human-rights advocate, working tirelessly to secure a measure of justice for her husband and thousands of others whose lives were destroyed by the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.
The title of “I’m Still Here,” the director Walter Salles’s stirring new drama about the Paiva family, comes, like the movie itself, from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the youngest of Rubens and Eunice’s children. It can be read as either a defiant declaration or a bitter lament. (Eunice is played by Fernanda Torres, and her superbly controlled performance is both subtle and capacious enough to accommodate either possibility.) By the time the film winds to a close, decades after Rubens’s disappearance, the fact that Eunice is still here—that she has outlived the regime that tore her family apart—is a proud testament to her strength and resilience. But her endurance has also been one prolonged defeat; as Eunice herself says in the film’s closing passages, having to go on without Rubens, not knowing if he would ever return, condemned her and her family to “eternal psychological torture.”
Salles’s movie, his first narrative feature since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” means to convey some sense of that torture. But it also dilutes the sting, folding the raw anguish of Eunice’s experience in a warm, gauzy blanket of humanist storytelling. A gentle glow suffuses the opening moments, set during an idyllic afternoon at the beach, and later seems to pervade each lovingly appointed room of Rubens and Eunice’s nearby home. Everything we see and hear exalts the Paivas as a model of infectious, unruly familial joy: good-natured sibling banter, spontaneous dance parties, generously overflowing meals, and a seemingly open invitation to friends, neighborhood kids, and even a stray dog, which, naturally, is adopted the moment it wanders inside. Salles himself knew the Paivas and visited their home as a child, a fact that, along with the vibrant, funky specificity of Carlos Conti’s production design, may account for the depth of feeling he brings to these spirited hangouts. The action, radiantly shot by the cinematographer Adrian Teijido, flows effortlessly between indoors and outdoors; the house’s proximity to the ocean is at once a matter-of-fact physical reality and an easy metaphor for the family’s ebullient sense of freedom.
But it is Eunice, at once a steadying presence and a sharp observer, who seems most conscious of the growing threats to that freedom. The movie’s very first shot, beautiful yet full of foreboding, finds her swimming in the Atlantic, her peace momentarily disturbed by the roar of a military helicopter overhead. Later, as the Paivas pose for a photo with friends on the beach, Eunice’s smile wavers at the increasingly familiar sight of armed soldiers in vehicles tearing past. She says nothing; Rubens (Selton Mello), who keeps a close watch on the situation with friends and colleagues, seems initially unworried. Moment by moment, though, anxiety mounts. The Paivas send their eldest child, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), to London for the holidays, keeping her and her political-activist streak temporarily out of harm’s way. Not long after news breaks that a Swiss diplomat has been kidnapped by Brazilian left-wing guerrillas, armed men show up at the Paivas’ door and haul Rubens away for a “deposition.” We never see what happens to him; from this point onward, the camera remains all but glued to Eunice, trapped at home with her children. The men, terse, unsmiling, and unfailingly polite, keep them under siege for days.
“I’m Still Here” is at its strongest in these inherently tense sequences, in part because Salles doesn’t sensationalize. His approach, during the initial shock of Rubens’s removal, is simply to drain away every prior trace of warmth and ebullience. The curtains are drawn, plunging the house into unnatural shadows; a terrible silence descends, broken only when Eunice offers the men food and asks if they know when her husband will return. The hush and the darkness only deepen when Eunice and her second-eldest daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are taken to a nearby facility for questioning; Eliana, we later learn, is released after a day, but Eunice is imprisoned for nearly two weeks, assaulted with questions about her husband’s affiliations with “terrorists,” and asked to identify other suspected subversives in photographs. She quietly meets this gruelling ordeal head on, keeping her fear outwardly in check and trying her best to ignore the screams issuing forth from neighboring cells.
Torres’s performance here is a marvel of expressive restraint, every glance merging horrified disbelief and meticulous self-control. Even when Eunice finally returns home, scrubs away twelve days of grime, and reunites with her children, she maintains her composure with a sureness that is almost indescribably moving. Tellingly, it is not until well after Eunice’s release that she registers anything even close to anger. She also manages to keep her temper in check when she learns of secrets that Rubens and his allies had kept from her, and when those in a position to help her insist that they cannot. Only once, when fate cruelly twists the knife—the one development that feels like a manipulation too far—does Eunice finally lose control, raise her voice, and unleash the full force of her rage against the junta. By this point, you may genuinely fear for her safety. The Paivas are being watched, after all, by forces that regard even the mildest criticism as an act of treason.
In more than one sense, “I’m Still Here” is a movie about the strategic withholding of information. Rubens is arrested for reasons unspecified. For years, the junta, trying to maintain the illusion of normalcy, refuses to acknowledge that he was even arrested. Efforts to raise awareness of Rubens’s disappearance generally bypass local media outlets, most of which are assumed to be propaganda arms of the government. Eunice herself is both a victim and a perpetrator of deception; kept in the dark about some of her husband’s activities, she, in turn, hides the worst news from her children for as long as possible, including the growing likelihood that Rubens is dead.
It was shrewd of the screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, to stick so closely to Eunice’s perspective, trusting the audience to identify with her uncertainty, her vulnerability, and her instinctive urge to protect her children. But “I’m Still Here” has its own share of tactical evasions, and its dramatic caginess winds up blunting its own emotional force. It’s no surprise that none of the supporting characters can match Eunice for nuance or gravity, but you may long for at least a rougher-edged vision of the Paivas’ family life, which feels strangely idealized even under these least ideal of circumstances. The children are each given a handy distinguishing trait or two: Veroca is the worldly firebrand on the cusp of adulthood, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) the lovable goofball. At various points, we see grainy home-movie footage of the Paivas family—a stylish yet curiously superfluous touch, given that the more conventionally shot domestic material already seems to have been fed through a nostalgic filter.
Even Eunice seems to get short shrift as the story leaps ahead twenty-five years to 1996, the year in which the family finally achieves a measure of legal closure. The victory is the result of a years-long fight for justice, but the script provides almost no sense of how it was actually fought, and it falls entirely on Torres’s shoulders to provide hints of the moral and intellectual spark that drove Eunice to embark on her remarkable second act. This narrative blip is followed by another: it’s 2014, and Eunice, now battling Alzheimer’s disease in her eighties, struggles to hold on to her memories of all that her family has lived through. It’s hard not to interpret this sequence as an understated warning to contemporary Brazil, which, in the era of Jair Bolsonaro, has shown signs of a troubling historical amnesia about the dictatorship.
Inadvertently driving home these modern-day political echoes, local far-right groups attempted to mount a boycott of “I’m Still Here” when it was released in Brazilian theatres, in November. Those efforts proved happily and laughably unsuccessful: Salles’s film became the highest-grossing Brazilian movie since the pandemic, and it has enjoyed a similarly warm embrace abroad. The movie won a screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall, and just last week it received three Academy Award nominations—for Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, and Best Actress (Torres). Oscar buzz is never inherently interesting, but the energy surrounding “I’m Still Here” has undeniable cultural resonance in an industry not known for its excessive recognition of Latin American filmmakers and performers. Torres is only the second Brazilian performer ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar; the first was none other than her mother, the veteran actor Fernanda Montenegro, who was nominated for her splendid work in Salles’s 1998 drama, “Central Station,” in which she plays a curmudgeonly retired schoolteacher who makes a living writing letters for the illiterate, and who briefly appears in “I’m Still Here.” Montenegro didn’t win—she lost to Gwyneth Paltrow, for “Shakespeare in Love”—and the perceived snub, no less than her performance, has become the stuff of legend in Brazil.
There are a couple of sly callbacks to “Central Station” in “I’m Still Here,” the slyest of which involves the deliberate misreading of a handwritten letter. (Here, as in the earlier film, a small lie becomes an act of love.) The other, although amply reported on in the film press, is worth discovering for yourself; it’s a lovely moment, though also, it would seem, an ingeniously contrived one. I suspect that Salles, in giving Torres such a star-making showcase, while also referencing Montenegro’s own, means to jog the memories of more than a few Academy voters, perhaps in hopes that they might be moved to rectify at least one historical injustice. ♦
2025-01-30 20:06:02
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On Tuesday, the Trump Administration sent out a memo attempting to put a blanket pause on most federal funding, sowing confusion about financing for student loans, SNAP benefits, nonprofits, and more. The next day, after a backlash, the Administration rescinded the memo, while maintaining that a freeze remains in “full force and effect.” The order created chaos across the federal government, threatening a power struggle between the President, Congress, and the courts. The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Trump’s directives are testing how far a President can go.
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2025-01-30 08:06:02
The second hour of “Gone with the Wind,” the bold, almost brazenly romantic Civil War epic that won ten Academy Awards, is largely a portrait of hell. “The skies rained death,” the screen reads. General William Tecumseh Sherman and his Union Army have brutally taken Atlanta during a hard-fought campaign, at a combined cost of nearly seventy-five thousand casualties. Scarlett O’Hara, a wealthy white Southerner, picks her way out of the city, passing the littered remains of wagons and men while vultures hover overhead. All the plantation houses she sees have been reduced to charred ruins.
Only her own plantation has survived Sherman’s assault. Scarlett opens the door to find her father, but it’s clear from his blank eyes that he’s a broken man. The house, too, is a mere shell of itself. The Yankees used it as a headquarters, and they stole everything they didn’t burn: livestock, clothes, rugs, even Scarlett’s mother’s rosaries. The slaves, too, are gone—only three out of a hundred are left. Scarlett, starving, staggers behind the house and tries to eat radishes from the ground, searching for whatever scraps of food remain.
This scene is typical of the way Sherman’s march through Georgia is usually depicted. In the fall of 1864, Sherman took sixty thousand Union soldiers some two hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to the ocean, scorching a vast swath of the state along the way. Parts of Atlanta were razed to the ground, and Savannah became Sherman’s “Christmas gift” to Abraham Lincoln. The campaign is remembered as a path of destruction, a total war waged against the white civilians of the South.
Yet to the many enslaved people across the state who left their homes and followed Sherman to the sea, the march meant freedom. Theirs was not the stately freedom of legislative proposals and Presidential proclamations, of men debating and signing documents. It was, instead, military emancipation—always a messy endeavor, full of risks and fears and betrayals, and one that is sometimes forgotten in accounts of how emancipation occurred. This is the central narrative of Bennett Parten’s new book, “Somewhere Toward Freedom.” Parts of this story have been told before, in bits and pieces, in broader works about the Civil War or emancipation or the march itself. But Parten’s may be the first to make freedpeople its sole focus, and to claim that they were essential to the march’s meaning.
Sherman’s march started in Atlanta, the railroad and manufacturing hub that fell to his army in early September, 1864. Sherman had slowly fought his way there from Chattanooga, using a series of minor skirmishes and flanking maneuvers as he worked his way south. In July, he won a set of major victories near the city, but then his momentum stalled. Finally, he managed to pull one more maneuver, going all the way around Atlanta to cut off its southerly connections. The Confederates saw the score and promptly skedaddled. “Atlanta is ours,” Sherman wrote, “& fairly won.”
Sherman’s presence in Georgia, like the Union Army’s presence anywhere in the South, had a corrosive effect on slavery. Almost as soon as his army took Atlanta, the city became “a haven for freed people from across the region,” Parten writes, “with men and women pouring in from the surrounding countryside.” Indeed, enslaved people had been fleeing to Union lines from the start of the war—and Republicans in Congress had been putting in place the policies to make them free. Within months of the war’s start, Congress instructed the military that soldiers had no responsibility to return fugitive slaves; soon after that, the First Confiscation Act said that Southerners forfeited the service of any enslaved people who had been employed against the United States. Under this framework, any slaves coming voluntarily to Union lines were effectively emancipated. The policy freed tens of thousands of enslaved people during the next year as the Union encroached along the edges of the Confederacy. On the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where the Union established a beachhead just seven months into the war, white planters fled the approaching Army while some ten thousand slaves stayed put. “Son, dat ain’t no t’under,” one mother reportedly said when she heard the cannons, “dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”
Soon, an even larger emancipation was taking place along the Mississippi River. In the spring of 1862, Ulysses Grant’s army advanced from the north while David Farragut’s amphibious operation came up from the south in a pincer movement around Vicksburg. Full control of the Mississippi would not come for another year, but in the meantime the Union acquired some of the largest cotton and sugar plantations in the South, which were home to more than a hundred and fifty thousand enslaved people. Recognizing that the First Confiscation Act was no longer adequate to deal with the situation on the ground, Republicans quickly passed the Second Confiscation Act, providing for the immediate emancipation of rebel-owned slaves in areas occupied by the Union Army. Practically speaking, this amounted to an announcement that the Union’s goal was universal emancipation in the seceded states—as Lincoln made clear with his Emancipation Proclamation several months later.
With soldiers now allowed to entice enslaved people to their lines and Black men able to enlist, the Union Army officially became an army of liberation, absorbing ever larger numbers of freedom seekers as it moved through the South. In early 1864, not long before beginning his campaign in Georgia, Sherman took twenty thousand troops on a monthlong march across Mississippi, living off the land and deliberately punishing the big planters whom the Army held responsible for the war. “Last year they could have saved their slaves,” Sherman wrote as he embarked on the march, “but now it is too late—all the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves any more than their dead grandfathers.” As many as eight thousand slaves fled the fields to follow Sherman’s troops.
By the time Sherman and his men marched through Georgia later that year, it was clear that enslaved people would follow wherever they went. Soldiers didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But, to the extent that they did have a choice, it’s worth noting that in the Presidential election that occurred a week before they embarked from Atlanta, an astonishing eighty-six per cent of Sherman’s troops chose Lincoln. These soldiers knew what they were voting for—a platform of pursuing the war to its conclusion and securing a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery—and they wrote home to tell their friends and family to vote for it, too. “If McClellan gets the reins he will have peace sooner than Abe, but by letting them have their slaves,” one soldier told his girlfriend, contrasting the two main candidates. “Then we can fight them again in ten years. But let Old Abe settle it, and it is always settled.” Sherman’s march would mark the culmination of military emancipation, and this fact alone justifies the closer look that Parten gives it.
After taking Atlanta, Sherman faced the question of where to go from there. Most people probably would have pursued the Confederate Army that was retreating to Alabama. But Sherman was determined to make a decisive move that would end the war. “If the North can march an army right through the South,” he told Grant, “it is proof positive that the North can prevail in this contest.”
Sherman’s troops left the city in the middle of November and started to move through a string of central-Georgia counties, where some hundred and fifty thousand slaves had been held before the war. The steady stream of freedom seekers making their way to the Army quickly became a flood. As Parten points out, though, joining the march was never a straightforward choice between slavery and freedom. Sherman, more than many other Northern officers, resisted racial equality. “A nigger is not a white man,” he wrote a few months before starting the march to Savannah, “and all the Psalm singing on earth won’t make him so.” He was happy to take on able-bodied Black men, sometimes even pressing them into service, but he evaded Army policy and avoided enlisting them as soldiers. Instead, he placed them in so-called pioneer roles, responsible for the backbreaking manual labor of clearing downed trees and laying logs across muddy patches. One Union officer suspected that the work was “in many instances greater than they were subjected to by their former owners.”
Not all Black men may have been excited about such an assignment, nor would they necessarily have been thrilled by the prospect of separation from their families, whom Sherman had no intention of supporting. Sometimes these family members remained behind, and sometimes they struggled to follow along in the Army’s wake, trying to stay safe and secure food while marching many miles a day. There were no good options. Nevertheless, a total of nearly twenty thousand freedpeople appear to have followed Sherman’s army to Savannah in late December, and it’s impossible to say how many others might have joined for at least part of the way.
If there was a consensus among Union soldiers that slavery needed to end, there was considerably less agreement about what Black freedom should mean and how Black people should be treated. Plenty of soldiers could vote for Lincoln, fight for abolition, and still abuse or harass at least some of the Black people they encountered across the South. Sherman’s foraging teams sometimes targeted slave cabins in addition to plantation houses, and they often proved perfectly willing to threaten slaves (a rifle held to the temple, say) to get information about where a plantation’s food, livestock, and money might be squirrelled away. Some of this was sheer frustration, soldiers taking out their pains and losses on whatever outlet was available, but very often it was also clear racist resentment.
The most egregious incident of the whole march involved Sherman’s aptly named subordinate Jefferson C. Davis, who bore no relation to the Confederate President but who seems to have shared some of his opinions about Black people. When Davis’s troops crossed Ebenezer Creek, about twenty miles northwest of Savannah, he ordered the pontoon bridges pulled up before the Black refugees behind the Army could get across, leaving those refugees—mostly women, children, and old folks—to try to ford the creek on their own. Some were killed or reënslaved at the hands of oncoming Confederate cavalry, and others drowned in the frigid water. Davis’s conduct at Ebenezer Creek soon leaked to the Northern press, owing to outraged consciences within his own corps, and those reports contributed to the Lincoln Administration’s mounting concerns that Sherman had “manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro” in the course of the march.
The rumors even prompted Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, to come south to Savannah, ostensibly for his health but actually to follow up on the negative reports that had been flowing north. On January 12, 1865, he arranged a meeting at Sherman’s headquarters with twenty local Black leaders, mostly ministers, and went so far as to request an indignant Sherman to leave the room so that he could get some frank answers about the general’s conduct. The Black leaders, it turned out, praised Sherman to the heavens, which may have been what Stanton was wanting to hear. But something else they said earlier, with Sherman still in the room, was more surprising. They told Stanton and Sherman that what they wanted most was an area where they could live on their own land, separate from whites, in order to avoid Southern prejudices.
This bold vision of Black freedom and independence happened, at just that moment, to map perfectly onto Sherman’s own desire to rid himself of the refugees before his army continued its march into the Carolinas. Four days after the meeting with the ministers, he issued Special Field Order No. 15, sometimes considered the most radical order of the entire war, which set aside a vast strip of land—stretching about two hundred miles from Charleston to northern Florida, and extending thirty miles inland from the coast—on which freedpeople would be allowed to settle, claiming homesteads of up to forty acres on abandoned Confederate property. (This is generally taken to be the origin of the phrase “forty acres and a mule”—though it was a separate order, a few days later, that mentioned the allocation of “partially broken down” pack animals.)
Despite concerns about the permanence of the arrangement, some forty thousand freedpeople settled in the coastal reserve in the next six months, planting crops and forging communities. “It was Plymouth colony repeating itself,” one awed northern correspondent wrote. “So blooms the Mayflower on the South Atlantic Coast.”
The Confederate slave system was vast at the start of the Civil War, encompassing about three and a half million enslaved people scattered across seven hundred and fifty thousand square miles. It was large enough that hundreds of thousands of slaves could become free behind Union lines, creating a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, while still making only a minor dent in the enslaved population as a whole. Even Sherman’s march freed only a few per cent of the prewar slave population of Georgia and South Carolina, and across the entire Confederacy perhaps fifteen per cent of all slaves had been freed by the end of the war. It turned out that military emancipation, as important as it was, could not destroy slavery on its own. For that, an amendment was required, and its final ratification, in December, 1865, may have freed more slaves than the previous four years of fighting.
Nevertheless, Sherman’s march hastened the South’s surrender, and his Special Field Order No. 15 prompted new attention to the problem of how the government might support former slaves after the war. The greatest strength of Parten’s book is the way it follows this turn from achieving emancipation to defining freedom, allowing his brief account to illuminate some of the largest dynamics of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
By March, 1865, Sherman and his men had made it to North Carolina, where they would later secure one of the final Confederate surrenders of the war. That month, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau, whose full name—the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—suggests the scope of its concerns. Among other things, the Freedmen’s Bureau had the power to give Sherman’s Special Field Order full civil authority, and it extended that order’s central promise to all “abandoned and confiscated” lands across the South, where refugees and freedmen would be able to rent forty-acre plots for three years, with the option to buy.
Just as the Freedmen’s Bureau was starting to act, however, the owners of those “abandoned and confiscated” lands began to return to their old homes. “Secesh are coming back thick,” as one Northern teacher in the Sea Islands put it that summer. This made for some strange reunions. The planter Stephen Elliott received kind treatment from the people he had formerly enslaved, including sumptuous breakfasts and dinners, but his hosts also left no doubt that they now owned the land. One problem, after Lincoln’s assassination, was that freedpeople had fewer friends in high places to help them back up those claims, particularly with Congress out of session until the end of the year. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, swiftly granted an amnesty to most former Confederate citizens, restoring all rights to property (except enslaved people). The status of “abandoned” lands remained unclear for a few months, but when former planters complained, Johnson proved willing to give back any property that hadn’t already been sold.
Johnson’s generosity to former slaveholders extended even to the coastal region covered by Sherman’s Special Field Order. During the summer and fall, the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to settle as many freedpeople as it could in the area and to stall returning Confederates for as long as possible, hoping that Congress might validate freedpeople’s land titles when it convened in December. But these bureaucratic machinations proved no match for Johnson, who, in October, dispatched the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Oliver O. Howard, to Edisto Island to deliver the news. Black people packed an Episcopal church to hear what he had to say, but there was so much chatter and complaint in the crowd that he couldn’t begin. Then, above the noise, a single woman’s voice could be heard carrying the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” and everyone else began to join in. What Howard had to say next, after the room got quiet, was a profound disappointment, if not entirely a surprise.
Early the following year, in 1866, the military kicked out any freedpeople who refused to make contracts to rent or work the land. Mostly, this meant refugees who had followed Sherman’s army from Georgia. Parten ends his book with the group “making a long walk home . . . perhaps alone [and] empty handed.” Their removal from the land was a disaster for both the freedpeople themselves and the United States as a whole.
Still, as with several of the larger claims that Parten tries to make for Sherman’s march, his conclusion that the refugees returned home “no more certain of freedom than they had been when they had left” is misleading at best. All the failures of Reconstruction, real as they were, cannot justify such grave doubts about the achievements of abolition. Let us list just a few of them: legally recognized marriages, family stability free from the threat of sale, the possibility of an education, the ability to go to court to enforce contracts and property rights. “We have no massa now,” as a group of freedmen told one official—“we is come to the law now.” That was the central shift, and despite its shortcomings, its significance should never be underestimated.
Even in the Sea Islands, that potential Eden from which many freedpeople had been expelled, not all was lost. Those who had been lucky enough to purchase their property ended up, after lengthy legal challenges, being able to prove their rights in court. In 1860, more than three-quarters of Beaufort County’s population had been enslaved. By 1890, three-quarters of the county’s land was owned by Black people. The society around them was far from equal, and would only get worse in the coming years, but that was still a revolution worth marching for. ♦
